Before texlive got moved to unmaintained I was (slowly) poking at it to
see what's needed to make it work.
At first I planned to split it up, but upon further consideration, I'm
dubious if that's sensible for a package I would not be able to maintain.

There are a few issues that prevent the current texlive package from working:
1- a lot of links need to be set up.
AFAICT, this is supposed to be done by running
/usr/share/texmf-dist/scripts/texlive/texlinks.sh after installation,
or by running "make texlinks" after "make install".
It can also be done manually, if you have the list of links.

2- in /usr/share/texmf-dist/web2c/texmf.cnf, TEXMFROOT should be set to
/usr/share rather than $SELFAUTOPARENT
(SELFAUTOPARENT is $BINDIR/../..; it is the default value of TEXMFROOT,
but only makes sense for the default multiplatform builds.)

3- /usr/share/texmf-dist/scripts/texlive/tlmgr.pl uses SELFAUTOPARENT
when it plainly is meant to use TEXMFROOT.

4- No TeX fonts/packages are included.
At least for packages, having a working tlmgr will circumvent this.
I'm not certain if fonts are available in tlmgr.
The alternative is to fetch texlive-$SOMEDATE-texmf.tar.xz,
extract it, and copy .../texmf-dist/* to $SYSROOT/usr/share/texmf-dist/.
texlive-texmf is platform-independent data, and weighs a little under 2GB.

What's the recommended way of dealing with these?
I'm thinking of the following at the moment:
- don't split the packages up.
-for 1, I think adding "make texlinks" is the best option
-for 2 and 3, my WIP uses sed; but I realize that patches are preferred.
-for 4, I don't really have a good answer.